Green-Wood
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Three Wee Damselflies
Fragile Forktail (Ischnura posita) male. Tell-tale broken strip on the thorax like an exclamation point. One of the inch-long damsels.And this looks like the female Fragile Forktail.Immature female Lilypad Forktail (Ischnura kellicotti). Just over an inch long. Without binoculars or telephoto, it’s hard to see this gorgeous orange color. And some kind of bluet…
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Shorebirds
Breeding season over, shorebirds are heading back south as the migration pendulum swings the other way. Here are a few of the species I saw this week along Brooklyn’s shoreline:Black-bellied Plover (Pluvialis squatarola). Ruddy Turnstone (Arenaria interpres) and American Oystercatcher (Haematopus palliatus), which looks like it’s got a Blue Mussel (which shouldn’t be that hard,…
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Lilypad Forktail
Lilypad Forktail (Ischnura kellicotti) male damselfly on a lily pad. The location was a big clue to identifying this small damselfly (a fair number of damselfly species are electric blue), which spends its life on and around waterlilies. The downward bending of the abdomen tip when it poses is also characteristic of this species. The…
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Froggy
Valley Water in Green-Wood is swarming with tadpoles right now. Here’s one of many hundreds popping up for a gulp of air. They were zooming up and then down into the murk.This rock, however, provided a nice docking area for them. Not sure if there is more than one species here or some are just…
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Pondhawk
Common or Eastern Pondhawk (Erythemis simplicollis). This is an immature male; his thorax will turn completely blue as he reaches maturity. Superficially like the common Blue Dasher, but larger, with clear wings, and white appendage. These Pondhawks are known as great predators, and capture and eat dragonflies their own size, including others of their own…
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Lily, Amberwings
Male Eastern Amberwing (Perithemis tenera) on Water Lily (Nymphaeaceae). Twisted love: Amberwings making more Amberwings. The female, who lacks the amber wings, immediately started depositing eggs on a drop of water on a water lily leaf after this acrobatic display. This species is just about an inch long, making it one of the smallest dragonflies…
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Tits and So Forth
According to my iBirds UK app, this is a representation of a Great Tit (Parus major), which is not to be confused with the Bearded Tit, Long Tailed Tit, Blue Tit, Coal Tit, Crested Tit, Marsh Tit, or Willow Tit. Good gravy, that’s a lot of Tits. I found this on top of a gravestone…
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Green-Wood
Cherries are starting to bloom.Although still chilly, the morning sun was strong enough to begin heating these hard cases up.The bulbs and corms, of course, are bursting with stored-up goodness. Dark-eyed Junco, a winter bird, still hanging around. Two weeks ago, when I was last in Green-Wood, the cemetery was all about the Common Raven,…
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We are here only a moment
Green-Wood Cemetery, like the city at large, lost a mess of trees during Sandy. One of them was this giant, which was also the home of a Red-tailed hawk nest for several years. Judging from Facebook, these pins were probably put in by the Cemetery’s tree specialist, Adam Rychlicki, who has been doing this sort…
Backyard and Beyond 